Getting the Writers to Care about Localized Documents

Do your technical writers go through the localized documents before handing them off to production?

I thought not.

It is, of course, just one more thing on a writer's already crowded list of things to do. Add to that the appeal for the writer of going through a book in a language of which s/he has probably no notion, and you have a recipe for can't/won't/don't want to.

You can go through it yourself, localization manager that you are, and you'll probably find a few things wrong. But the writers are looking for very different things, and they have a talent for spotting them immediately. If you can get your writers around the corner on the inconvenience of the exercise, you'll find that they add real value. The movement into and out of translation software can break things in a large document, and who better to detect such things - even with no more than a cursory overview - than the people who wrote the book in the first place?

I've seen writers go through translated versions of their documents and find:

• unexplained typeface changes
• broken or dead hyperlinks
• missing callouts
• untranslated text
• incorrect document part numbers
• corrupted graphics
  

The real showstopper, though, occurs at the end of a two-month translation cycle for a 300-page manual, when the writer spends ten minutes going through the book, then sends you e-mail that reads, "Nice job on the Chinese manual, but you got the wrong version translated."

Maybe not the optimal time to find this out, but once again: Who besides the writer would have caught this?

Localization Testbenches, Part IV (Online Help)

What are you using to test your localized products? If you're handing them to your domestic QA team and expecting that they'll intuitively test them with correct language locale settings, you may be in for an unpleasant surprise.

3) Help files
Your online documentation also deserves some testing. After its contents (usually HTML pages or XML documents) have been translated - in the correct encoding for the target language - the help project will be compiled, in the same way that software applications are compiled. This compilation step needs to account for the correct language, locale and encoding, and this doesn't happen by itself, no matter how lucky you may feel today.

Again, it's important to test the help file in an environment that closely matches your customers' environment. Run your Greek help file on a native Greek operating system. Be sure to test the main window, the contents pane and the index for properly displayed characters. Above all, perform a few searches using native characters in the Find field to ensure that your help file's index was properly created and encoded; if your searches are successful, then your customers' searches will probably be successful as well.

Note: HTML Help under Windows has some idiosyncrasies when it comes to the table of contents (TOC) pane and the main window. Most tools like RoboHelp will properly encode the TOC and main pane content for, say Japanese, when all of the content resides in the same project. However, if you're building your HTML help files with your own tools (e.g., Perl scripts and hh.exe), you may find that encoding sauce for the goose is not encoding sauce for the gander. We've found, for example, that the HTML pages displayed in the main window are happy with UTF-8, whereas the TOC pane won't support UTF-8 but will support Shift-JIS.

Localization Testbenches, Part III (Web sites)

What are you using to test your localized products? If you're handing them to your domestic QA team and expecting that they'll intuitively test them with correct language locale settings, you may be in for an unpleasant surprise.

2) Web sites
Performing QA on localized Web sites requires less overhead. Most browsers nowadays accommodate multi-byte characters automatically and without installing language packs. So, if you send e-mail pointing your executive staff to your newly unveiled Chinese site, you can be sure that most of them will see a page free of corrupted characters.

Dumb HTML pages, however, are not where the biggest problems lie. You need to ensure that your forms, auto-responders, search pages, search result pages, search indexing and databases all support the target languages.

This can in fact be more complex than localizing software; while localizing software requires plugging a lot of holes, they're all your holes. Localizing an entire Web presence and user experience can require plugging holes among different products and platforms: Web server, Web application, database, reporting utility, e-mail software, shopping cart. To do right by the visitors to your Web site, you need to test everything all along this click-path.

It's rare that you will need to build a new app server based on the Hebrew versions of Linux, Apache, etc. to support these languages and users. But if characters and messages are not surviving all the way through your e-path, you may need to enable the support in several places, order some language packs and research the locale's computing needs. This is hard to do on a testbench in a lab, so you may end up testing your own international-stage instances on production servers throughout the organization.

Localization Testbenches, Part II (Software)

What are you using to test your localized products? If you're handing them to your domestic QA team and expecting that they'll intuitively test them with correct language locale settings, you may be in for an unpleasant surprise.

1) Software
This will probably take you the most time to get right, because you need to go to more pains to emulate the real-world scenario of your customers. They've bought computers running Windows XP/Japanese or Linux/Russian or MacOS/Arabic. The hardware nowadays isn't different (except for the keyboards), so you don't need to outfit your lab with machines from all over the planet.

However, if you install your Korean product under US-English Windows XP, you'll probably be in for lots of corrupted characters on screen. This is because characters in Korean (and Japanese, Chinese, Arabic and a few other languages) take up two bytes, whereas characters in English (and other Western languages) take up only one byte. An English operating system tries to interpret the Korean characters one byte at a time, and the result is usually illegible.

Modern operating systems include the fonts and locale support for these multi-byte languages, though it usually needs to be enabled. This is a good half-measure for testing your localized products, but it's still not exactly what your in-country customers will see, so you should consider native-language testbenches, onto which you freshly install the native operating system.

This can get clunky and hardware-intensive - even if you're partitioning the disk and dual-booting - so you may also consider virtualization products like VMWare and Virtual Disk. You can host dozens of different native-language systems on a single hard drive, and run several of them at a time, if your machine is sufficiently endowed.

Of course, almost any solution will spook your testers, who will consult their job descriptions and inform you that they contain no mention of "putting up with weird languages." This is not an insurmountable problem, though it is a topic for another post.

Note: Believe it or not, some people think it's pretty slick to see MacOS in Portuguese or Russian RedHat. They are hypnotized by how similar the interface is, and struck by the differences. A neat show-stopper for your evangelization sessions.